A week or so ago, in the wake of Tropical Depression (formerly Hurricane Debby), I was walking up the beach, and I caught a wonderful odor of root beer. Fallen from the cliff, or maybe even washed in from elsewhere was a whole Sassafras tree, with roots intact and washed clean of dirt. The roots of Sassafras are the original source of root beer. Over a few days, I brought a few sections of root home. On Sunday, I stripped the bark off enough them to make one small batch of root beer, using (approximately) this recipe,
Homemade Sassafras Root Beer.
As I said, approximately. The recipe calls for some spices. Our spices were kind of old, so we boosted them slightly. We didn't didn't have any allspice berries, so we had to guess how much of our old allspice powder to substitute, and I think I over did it a hair. The worst part was straining the resultant cooked root and spice mash. We tried coffee filters, but they kept clogging after only a few ounces of liquid. We ended up straining it through an old (but clean) piece of t-shirt from the rag cupboard. That worked pretty well. The best part about it all was how it made the house smell.
Yesterday, we got the final ingredient, the club soda, and actually mixed some of the finished root beer syrup. Not too bad! I think you can taste that we overdid the allspice, though.
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